Hacking: Oculus Rift

USC Hack Nights takes place every Thursday from 8PM – 1AM. This is where students come to work on their out-of-class projects with a supportive community and unique resources. Last Hack Night we got to play with some awesome tech –– the Oculus Rift. This is a really hot piece of hardware right now (developed by a USC student), that allows a person to be immersed in a virtual reality. You wear it like sun glasses, but it covers your entire field of view and seemingly transports you to a digital world. Check out more here!

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Anyways, we got the opportunity to play around with some developer kits (15 kits actually) and it was unbelievable. The Oculus completely tracks the motion of your head with an internal accelerometer, and uses data about the motion to manipulate the visuals that appear in front of you. It’s a cool combination of Mechanical and Electrical/Optical Engineering wizardry. Having the chance to play with these devices as a group was a fun community building activity, and just getting exposed to the technology was really unique.

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Next week, a Microsoft employee is coming in to run a Unity workshop. This is one platform for developing on the Oculus Rift, where you can design the environments that users are exposed to while wearing the device. This is all leading up to HackSC, USC’s large-scale hackathon, where Oculus, Microsoft, Apple and other industry leaders will be sponsoring. Check back in a couple weeks to hear more about HackSC and the technology we hack on every week at USC Hack Nights!